


just let me go (we’ll meet again soon)

by notavodkashot



Series: words are futile devices [7]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Angst, Galahdians' fucked up relationship with death and grief, Gen, Nyx Ulric's Fountain of Personal Trauma About Family and Duty, Sacrificed For The Greater Good, Self-Sacrifice, Someone give this poor boy a hug, War, War is terrible and horrific and spares no one, funerals and eulogies, survivor's guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-16
Updated: 2018-06-16
Packaged: 2019-05-24 05:42:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14948645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notavodkashot/pseuds/notavodkashot
Summary: There's nothing nobler than dying for the greater good.There's nothing worse than being the one left behind to pick up the pieces after that.





	just let me go (we’ll meet again soon)

**Author's Note:**

> ...I'm sorry?
> 
> I mean, we did the whump thing with Cor, so I figured it was only fair to do it with Nyx too.

* * *

_just let me go (we’ll meet again soon)_

* * *

Pain blooms on his face, sharp, jagged edges radiating from his cheek. 

“Never again,” his mother says, voice low, a hiss lost in the wind, but not enough it doesn’t curl into his ears and rings clear across his skull. “Do you understand?” 

And Nyx stares down at her, the rocky hill of her, extending into a mountain pass out of sheer stubbornness. He stares and stares, and the taller she grows, a peak of disapproval with a snowed in top, the more he shrinks, shoulders slumped and head bowed, years peeling back one at the time, all the way back until he’s less than thirteen, and the arrows and the lines, they’ve been exorcised from his skin. She’s his mother and he’s her son, and there’s very little room for rank to speak there. 

“I’m a soldier, Ma,” Nyx whispers, from the depths of his soul, fingers loose around the kukris, blades near crusted onyx with miasma leaking out of the toy soldiers the empire sent to crush them into mud. “Soldiers die.” 

“You’re my _son_ ,” she says, sharp like the echo of gunfire across the River, their pursuers only momentarily distracted by the den of coeurls Nyx made sure to get between them. “My son _survives_.” It sounds like a curse. Tastes like it. Nyx doesn’t dare say it out loud, because that will only make it take root faster. His mother exhales slowly, an old ghost from when he was a child and hid in rafters and pranked three quarters of their village before noon. “Take your sister, lead the march. _Do not look back._ ” 

He can’t. 

He’s a soldier, he’s the last surviving soldier in a good sixty miles around. He’s meant to close the march – soldiers in Galahd don’t prioritize the frontlines, they prioritize civilians, and a deep, dark corner of Nyx’s soul feels that’s probably why they’ve lost the war already. He’s fighting fit. The MT march is right on their heels, stomping rain-soaked grass under their feet with the same ease they crunch blood-soaked bones, and as soon as they cross the River, he’ll be the last thing standing between them and two hundred souls trying to find solace in high ground. 

“Don’t look back,” his mother tells him, words fierce and pressed into his throat. 

When she lets go of Selena, Nyx doesn’t really feel his sister sink her nails into his arm, not deep enough to bleed him, but enough the sting will take hours to fade. 

It’s not looking back if they never looked away in the first place. 

They stand on the base of the trail as she vanishes behind the tree line. Selena chokes on a sob when the River boils, water cresting twenty feet into the air and lightning hammering into it and spreading for miles on either side. Nothing will cross the River today. Or tomorrow. 

Selena cries and cries, and Nyx stands there, back straight, easily holding her weight when she slumps against his side. 

He can’t even remember what tears taste like. 

* * *

It gets easier (it doesn’t), days dragging into weeks, kicking and screaming until they become months. Sleep is easy if you’re half-drunk when you collapse, and he’s got Lib for backup to go hide behind, whenever he finally drops. 

It gets easier (it _doesn’t_ ), running ragged, here and there, passing along truths and lies and everything that might make a difference, engaging more and more, until one day he realizes everyone’s looking at him for guidance, support, terrible ideas. He’s grown old, ancient, deathless. His platoon rotates, dead left in ashtrays and the living burning to their bones already. The platoon rotates but he remains, and it’s sickly sweet and murderously true: _my son survives_. 

It gets easier ( _it_ doesn’t), or he gets better at lying (he does). 

The point is, he’s been not dying for long enough no one cares what his tattoos look like, and he huddles for warmth in the hollow of ancient trees, bark charred and branches naked, Crowe carefully set in the spaces where he and Libertus are further apart, watching rain fall and fall and wash nothing away. 

He should be sick of it, but he’s not. 

He’s sick with it, which is frankly an entirely different thing but he doesn’t have words to explain it, he has no words left really, all of them blackened and soulless. He used to have wit, is the thing, but then, he used to have many, many things and then the war came and he rushed to meet it, arms wide, embraced it like a lover because he was thirteen and stupid and he’s never regretted it more, choosing to become a man the way he did, cursing himself to destroy, never to build. Maybe, he thinks, those nights it’s really not easier at all, when his joins ache and his ribs creak with each breath, that’s why his mother had to die, had to repay the sin of a son who’d choose the life he did. 

But then he’d remember death had no care for personal stakes. 

She died nobly, his mother. She died for the greater good. She died a better soldier he’d ever be, he thinks, and the lesson he’s learned is this: death is made meaningful by the score of those that survive it. It’s heavy and monstrous and makes him want to die, but he’s yet to find something worthwhile enough to undo what she’d done. 

And when the Storm comes, anniversary of a covenant no one cares for anymore. 

He and Libertus are stationed forty miles away form the refugee camp they were guarding, herding really, further into the mountain ridge, hoping to get enough bodies to justify the trek into the tunnels and hopefully make way to the port on the other side, ships ready and waiting to carry them all to Aeolus. It’s dumb, Nyx knows. It’s dumb for them to huddle all together, make themselves into a single giant target to be taken out in one shot, but they are _Galahdian_. They can’t bear to leave anyone behind. They can’t bear to not go together into the dark. 

So when the rain turns sickly sweet and beckoning, when lightning dances and wraps around them, leaving behind warmth but no scars, Nyx stares at Libertus until he caves, and then they’re running through the field, feet finding their place even on muddied grass. 

They Walk, like their forefathers did, eons ago. They Walk and the Storm blesses them, and Nyx swallows back the question, the bitterness, because what good are blessings when the war is lost? What good is payment for their land, if in another decade they’ll be gone. 

He thinks of his mother, of her smile, of her body charred to nothing, mixed into the River’s flow. 

He thinks of bitter, terrible things, so hard in fact, that when Selena’s message comes, he almost feels responsible. 

* * *

Selena is not a soldier. 

That’s not to say she doesn’t know how to fight, vicious and feral and every bit as stubborn as he is, because she does and she has, and she learned much the same way he did, not dying one day at the time, cornered and scared and still sure she had things to do still. No, his sister is certainly skilled with a lance, enough to be alive still, and she’s seen and committed her share of murder. 

But she hasn’t been branded, like he has. She hasn’t made death her reason for existence, quite the same way he has. 

His sister, like his mother, like his fathers before they died, like most of the village he’d once called home, is a _healer_. She’s worth her weight in solid gold, her head full of recipes and secrets she has no time to teach, while she runs around the battlefields, trying her best to keep people alive long enough to make their inevitable deaths meaningful. She’s good at it, Nyx knows. She’s got the knack for it that he never did, that made his mother never try too hard to pass along those secrets to him. 

If the war hadn’t happened – and he doesn’t let himself linger too much, in those daydreams, lest the careful balance of bitterness in his gut is disrupted and he finds himself falling chest first into his kukris – he knows he probably would have left the village, eventually, looking for a trade and a life that suit him better than herbs and tonics and that delicate balance required to keep a garden well stocked. 

“You feel their suffering too much,” his mother told him, once, when he’d been seven and restless and told to go play with others instead of being taught how to mix herbs into something that forced wounds shut overnight. “You feel sorry for them, and you hurt for them. A healer can’t care overmuch for the people she heals, because she can’t always heal everyone.” 

It’s what makes him a good soldier, he reckons. That he cares. He cares enough to know what it means, if he fails. He cares enough it bites at him, every loss, steadily chipping away at his soul, until it’s pure self-preservation that keeps him going, demanding success. 

He leaves Libertus and Crowe behind, tells them they’ll meet in Aeolus, sort things out there. (He shares a look with Libertus, when Crowe’s not looking, and he knows he agrees: they’ll ship their sisters to the mainland and have a proper one last stand before they die.) The man who brought Selena’s message – who crawled across the island to reach him, missing an arm at the shoulder, and with a knee that slipped out of place every four steps – dies before they reach her. Nyx doesn’t stop to think about it, about his sister sending someone to die, just to reach him. She’s not sentimental, like him. She’s a healer, not a soldier, she’s got reasons to do what she does. 

Her reasons, Nyx finds out, after three weeks of meandering around the deep wood and one rather unfortunate encounter with a coeurl that he’s still not entirely sure how he survived, turned out to be about fifteen knee-high, terrified and bundled up children, kept in a cart with blankets and herbs and warmth. 

“I couldn’t just _leave_ them,” she hisses at him, voice low enough to not disturb their charges – theirs, his and hers, now, because of course he’s staying, of course he’s helping, that’s why she called him in, because she knows he cares – and eyes dark as she covers his chest with salve and immediately the skin stops aching and feeling like it’ll just flake off and fall at a moment’s notice. “They deserve better.” 

She’s got their mother’s eyes, he thinks, watching her slowly work herself up and then down, and all he can do is wrap an arm around her shoulders and press a kiss to her forehead when she’s done wrapping bandages around his burns. He’s got lightning in his chest, now, skin slowly gnarling up into the jagged edges of it. She doesn’t ask him what happened, even though she knows what left those marks. She doesn’t even tell him they’re good luck, even though they traditionally are, his lightning scars, because only the luckiest survive coeurls long enough to gain scars. 

He holds her close and promises nothing, because promises are like curses, too, once you let them escape your mouth, you can’t take them back, no matter how twisted and broken their meaning becomes – he _survives_ – and so instead he basks in the sound of her breathing. 

He doesn’t look at her leg, blackened with the telltale shadow of the black blight that came to the islands with the MTs, because he doesn’t know what to say about it, if he should say something. It’s right there, not quite hidden by the half skirt she wears for the sake of her pockets full of herbs and salts and treasures. It looks painful. Deadly. 

Nyx feels the words knot up into barbwire in his throat, so he says nothing at all and clings to her, instead. 

* * *

They’re late for the crossing. 

The cart is heavy – heavy with children and hopes and dreams and fears and questions too sharp to be answered – and Selena’s leg is getting worse, every day. It’s taken all they have, to reach the tunnels, but there’s no one left there, to wait for them. Nyx knows what it means, but he still offers to go in and check. Selena knows, too, he thinks, because she’s not surprised when he comes back and reports the cave-in seals not even half a mile in. 

They don’t mention the fact even without the cave-in, they’d be sitting ducks for deamons, two idiots barely grown and a cartful of children waiting to be slaughtered. 

“You’ve got something in there, right?” Nyx asks, carefully nibbling into his share of dinner, with the experience to know how to make it feel more than it is. He nods at her half skirt and the neat rows of pockets hanging all the way from her waist nearly to her ankles. His mother, he remembers almost thoughtlessly, used to wear something like that, too. “To put them to sleep?” 

Because the Nilfs are on their heels, advancing slow and steady and relentless, and Nyx is good, he is, but he’s not that good. MTs don’t have feelings, the stupid sacks of circuitry and murder, but they also don’t have _cruelty_. They’re efficient, is the thing. Fast. Swift. Nearly painless if one’s not conscious to see it coming. That’s Nyx’s theory anyway. 

The Nilfs are on their heels and they’ve accidentally trapped themselves in a bottleneck: the mines behind them are a dead end, and to their left there’s only jagged rock cliffs and that black, near oily sea that only offered death. Ahead of them is the River, pristine despite it all, forever flowing crystal made water, serving as their last line of defense and the only reason the MT march hasn’t reached them yet: it’s nearly thirty feet deep where they are, and then falls abruptly into the sea, cradled in those same rocky cliffs they can’t walk over. To the left is a path, sinuous and winding, to the docks; the path the mines were used to avoid, because it follows the thin space between the River and the mountain for nearly seventy miles, until the River splits off towards the other side of the island, and the path continues, all the way around the ridge and into the port. They’d never make it, though, along that path. They’d never make it. Not without getting shot by the numerous MT camps across the River. 

They’re cornered, and they know it. 

They’re going to die, and they know it. 

“Perhaps,” Selena replies, and Nyx pales when she drops her gaze to the ground, her leg – half eaten by the blight, skin black and thin and almost worn enough to see bone beneath, but she doesn’t cry about it, she still tells stories to the children, laughing and joking all day, while at night she bites into the leather scraps she keeps for this explicit purpose and has Nyx cut off the worst of it and throw it into the fire – and refuses to meet his eyes. “We know how to make the River uncrossable.” 

Nyx feels the world narrow to a single point, all shapes and colors and sounds distilled into a whisper. 

“No.” 

She’s younger than him, sixteen next summer, which will never come, now, and he’s meant to look after her and show her the way, but she snarls at him, instead, nothing sweet or tender left to her, and he flinches back with the urge to hurl. 

“Look at them,” Selena says, dark eyes bottomless like the starless sky above their heads, “really _look_ at them, and tell me you’d rather let them die.” 

Yes, he doesn’t say, because he’s not supposed to, but deep down in his bones he feels selfish and callous enough to exchange them for _her_ . But the truth, inexorable, thorn-wrapped truth, is that she’s right. Letting them die will not save her, will not buy them a chance to get away. 

“No,” he begs, for no other reason that he still remembers what it smelled like, Sin on the River, blood polluting the water. 

Selena smiles at him, kind and pitiful and he wants to scream and throw himself into the sea. 

“We’ll play for it,” she tells him, reaching her hands to hold his, like it’ll make a difference, like he doesn’t know what will happen. “Winner dies, loser lives on.” 

She’s dying, he knows. Even if she loses, she’ll die: only his awkward, shaky attempts at surgery have kept her going as long as she has: no one who catches the blight form the MTs lives beyond a fortnight. It’s new and foreign and deadly, unlike anything ever seen before, in Galahd. Selena certainly doesn’t know how to cure it, only how to contain it, somewhat. 

She’s dying and she’s ruthless and brave and everything he isn’t, because she still stages the game, dice pulled from the depths of her pockets, thrown like they meant something. They’re heavy in Nyx’s fingers, almost too heavy to bear: they fall off his grip, more than him even attempting to throw. He doesn’t look at the result. He doesn’t _have_ to. 

“Early tomorrow,” she says, grabbing the little inoffensive murder weapons and stuffing them back into their respective pocket. “Before they wake up.” 

Nyx stares and stares and stares and when she opens her arms he falls into her lap, weeping soundlessly at the brutal unfairness of it all. 

* * *

She gives him her half-skirt, full of pockets, full of wonders and all manner of terrible things. She’s folded it up into a neat little parcel that she puts in his hands, which shake and tremble, until her hands reach out to hold his face still. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and tugs him down to press her lips to his forehead. “I love you.” 

The words stick to his windpipe, sharp and vicious and full of hate. He slides the bundle of cloth and regret into the leather bag hanging off his belt, because he can’t… he can’t deal with it, right now. He can’t deal with words. Feelings. His mind is a wasteland and his eyes are wet and he knows what needs doing but he’s not sure he can. 

He must. 

She goes to the edge of the water, her gait so very obviously uneven, weakened. He wonders if she’s trying to hide it, for how long, how bad it really is, how much it really hurts. His throat convulses when he tries to swallow spit. And then she turns, facing the water, and her back looks endlessly wide, the kind of back that could shoulder the wold if it had to, and he feels small and miserable and insignificant, a speck of nothing, worth nothing. 

“I love you,” he says, at long last, stepping up behind her, wrapping an arm around her waist, and it would be nothing else but a hug, would be nothing else but two siblings finding comfort in their shared blood, their shared warmth, but then he says: “I’m sorry.” 

And the blade strikes true, well aimed in between ribs, striking right at the heart in one swift, sharp jerk of his wrist. She gasps, then gurgles, then falls forward into the foaming current, kukri still embeded in her chest. He’s glad for it. He doesn’t want it. 

He doesn’t want any of this. 

Her blood hits the water before her body can, and the explosion of light and heat and power as the River roars into life is strong enough to blow him back, clean off his feet. Nyx stares at the arcs of lightning, sulfur and ozone and _rage_. 

He should hurry back. Wake up the children and get on his way. 

He takes a moment, instead, to shriek at the sky, grief and rage and madness. 

Nothing but rain answers his call. 

* * *

He’s hollowed out, when he reaches port, three weeks later. He’s too tired to be grateful, when someone walks up and takes the children from him, promises to look after them and get them on the boats. He’s carved out every bit and piece of him left, to keep the kids from realizing what he’s done. 

What he’s done. 

But now he’s an empty shell, frail and thin like the shell of an egg, left with nothing but the knowledge that bloats his gut and his head and makes him want to die. He can die, now, he reckons. He’s done his part, he’s saved the lives she died for. He’s done all he could and quite a few things he always thought he couldn’t. 

He’s done now. 

He’s _done_. 

Libertus finds him before he can muster enough energy to walk off the pier and into the frothing seawater below. Nyx stares at him blankly, unable to explain, unwilling to name, exactly what had gone wrong, because of course Libertus knows something was wrong the moment he realizes Nyx is alone. 

_Nyx is alone._

Crowe puts more of a fight than him, when Libertus gets them onto a boat. But then Crowe has fire in her, anger and bitterness to keep her going. Nyx had used up those first, fast, the first three days he spent walking alongside the River, feeling the heat from the boiling water and knowing exactly what it meant. He’s nothing but bones and misery and guilt, sitting where Libertus tells him to sit, eating what he tells him to eat, and sleeping even when he’s told not to. 

On the fourth day at sea, they break through the storm ring around the archipelago. 

Nyx finds himself standing by the rail, peering at the nearly black water. 

“You gave me back, before,” Nyx whispers, remembering the taste of saltwater in his lungs, the panic of kicking and pushing and not being able to find where was up. “I think I’m ready to stay, this time.” 

He didn’t have anyone to go back to, anyway. Nor did he deserve anyone to go back to. 

He falls, and he _sinks_. 

Sank. 

_Gone_ . 

* * *

He washes out in Galdin, three days later, half-drowned but clearly not drowned enough. 

He lays on the sand the entire day, skin burning with the sun and the salt and the sand, because maybe if he tries hard enough, just a bit more, it’ll be enough. A group of hunters carrying the carcass of a crab the size of a lamb picks him up, just as the sky is getting dark, and Nyx is too tired and broken to argue, when they drag him into a strange stone platform that glows in the dark. It keeps daemons at bay, they explain, when they share their meal, and as he lies down on the hard stone floor, he begins to accept the reality that he is not going to die. Not today, at least. 

In the morning, he stays behind, even though the hunters offer to take him along. One of them, some ten years older than him, maybe, gives him a small satchel of round metal chips with raised squiggles on them. It took Nyx a while to realize they were coins, though he’d never seen them before. Gil, the hunter called them. Money is more than he can worry about though, at the time. He’d meant to die but clearly he isn't going to, so instead he’ll have to… he’ll have to live. 

He doesn’t deserve to live, though, that much he knows for sure. 

But not even the ocean will take him, freely given – and it meant something, considering that curse, the first one he’d had placed on him – and so that means it’s not just for him to die yet. Clearly, he must atone. Make amends. 

Pay it forward. 

He spends the day sitting on the rock face of the haven, fingers playing idly with the coins as he tries to make sense of his own head. And then he empties his pockets, taking stock of the soggy remnants of his belongings. Everything’s ruined except Selena’s bundle, because of course the thin, oily fabric is waterproof, and of course she folded up so it would be safe. He lays out the skirt before him and counts the pockets – seventy eight – and tries to figure out their contents – herbs and spices and weird glittery powders he can’t even guess the use for. But then he reaches the row of pockets closest to the long, leather ribbon used to tie it around one’s waist, and he finds pictures and trinkets in each and every one of them. Pictures of their mother and a handful of her earrings, not a single pair among the mismatched bits. Pictures of himself, and chips of wood he’d carved into vague shapes, back when he had the luxury to stop enough to let his hands get restless. Pictures of people he didn’t know, and all sorts of trinkets to go with them, like pebbles or marbles or just… _stuff_. The kind of thing that was only worthwhile for the people who owned it. 

It takes Nyx an embarrassingly long time to realize what this is. 

What they’re for. 

There just wasn’t time to burn pyres, to drink and remember, with the war on full swing, falling on them like a hammer on an anvil. 

It’s easy enough, to rouse the fire back to life. It’s much harder to throw things into it. A funeral without a eulogy is no funeral at all, but he doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know these people. He doesn’t know their stories, their struggles, their hopes and dreams and everything else that should be said, before letting them go. 

So he decides to make stuff up. 

He makes up stories on the pictures and the trinkets and gives the faces names that suit them. And he means it, when he wishes them good fortune in the beyond. He means it for each and every one of them. 

It’s nearly midnight when he’s done with all the strangers’ memories his sister tucked away into her pockets. All that remains is his family. He loses momentum again, hands shaking around the handful of pictures in his hands. 

He remembers the day the most recent ones were taken. Their trader had come home after the trade market with everything they’d asked for, but also a curiosity from the mainland. They’d taken turns taking family snapshots and then wasted a whole roll of picture paper making faces at it. Back then, he still had more tattoos than scars, and his contributions to the war did not require him to stray too far away from home. 

There’s also an older shot, tainted sepia, of their mother and their fathers, that Nyx barely remembers posing for, though he most have, considering he was wearing the nicest clothes he owned at the time. He looked seven or eight in that picture, Selena no older than five, standing proudly under the shadow of his parents, blissfully unaware both his fathers would join the war efforts later that year and die in quick succession less than six months after that. 

Nyx studies the muted echo of grief, when he thinks of them, and wonders if that was how it was meant to be, rather than the screaming, snarling fury that assaulted his senses whenever he thought of his mother and his sister. He’d helped burn the pyres for his fathers, one for each, and he’d been sad and heartbroken. And still, in the end he’d followed in their footsteps anyway. But there isn’t any crippling madness to it, to the thought of them. He barely remembers their faces, their voices, but he thinks, a touch hysterically, that’s how it’s supposed to be. 

The dead care for the dead, and the living must care for the living. 

He knows what he should do for them, like he’s done for all manner of strangers tonight. 

But it doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel proper. 

So instead Nyx throws his own face into the fire, all the pictures and wood chips, and swallows hard when the fire crests and chirps as it devours them. 

“Nyx Ulric was a son, a brother and a murderer,” he says, licking his lips, and holding the rest of the photos close to his chest. “He did the worst things with the best of intentions. He will _not_ be missed.” 

He hesitates, a split second of doubt, of doing what he should instead of what he wants. Then the moment passes and he slides the photos into the inside pocket of his shirt – he hasn’t been a runner in years, but he still wears shirts with inside pockets because old habits die hard – and stands up, staring at the sky. 

“These are the names and deeds of the dead that join the choir tonight,” he recites, and he feels sickly with how easy it is to say the words he’s heard so many times before now. “Their names and their deeds are ashes, like their bones. We’ve drank, we’ve cried, now let their ashes be carried by the storm, their burdens lifted from the living, us few remaining.” 

Nyx sits back down, to watch the fire dim and die, so he can collect the ashes and throw them at the storm. There is no storm in sight, of course, but he supposes if the ocean won’t take him, it can at least carry these home. 

* * *

Nyx is different, when he gets to Insomnia – which is a lot harder to get into, by land, than by boat, apparently. 

Libertus notices immediately, when he finds him, after a month and a half of meandering around the stupidly large metropolis. Galahdians stick together, after all. Find one, you’ll eventually find the one you want. Libertus, however, does not ask. Nyx loves him a lot, honestly, because of that. Libertus doesn’t ask and Nyx doesn’t say, doesn’t have to explain how he had to kill himself, to the best of his abilities, to be able to carry on. Much less why. 

They focus on surviving, instead. Insomnia is rough and unwelcoming to them, exasperated by their lack of understanding of their customs and traditions. They’re staying in the cramped shared housing some of the traders have managed to bargain for, sleeping pressed together into a single sleeping bag. 

“So,” Nyx announces, about four months after he died, throwing a newspaper at the table and going to sit next to Lib. “They’re starting this thing, the Kingsglaive. A fighting unit to take on the Nilfs, head on. They take in refugees, if you know how to fight.” 

Crowe’s eyes light up at the prospect, as Nyx’d expected. Libertus, however… 

“Haven’t you done enough fighting already?” He snaps, eyes narrowed, mouth twisted into a snarl. 

Nyx stares and stares, and then shrugs, carefully not thinking about screaming and death and boiling water. That didn’t happen to him. That happened to the him that died. 

But he can’t tell Lib that, of course. 

So he doesn’t. 

“Probably,” he says, flippant, and smiles as best he remembers how, “but I reckon I still have a bit fight left in me. Might as well use it to fuck up some Nilfs.” 

Libertus stares at him and then groans, rubbing a hand over his face. 

“Fine,” he spits out, looking anything but, “but when this fucking thing blows up in our faces, I plan on reminding you how much it is your fault.” 

Nyx laughed. It sounded wrong all around, but he supposed it was just a matter of learning how to laugh when all you wanted to do was crawl into a hole and die. 

“Deal.” 

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> Come hang out on [DW](https://notavodkashot.dreamwidth.org/) or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/notavodkashot), if you'd like.


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